The study, conducted by the university’s Faculty of Medicine, revealed that lupeol, a compound rich in fruits, selectively targeted and killed cancer cells. Using a mouse animal model, lupeol dramatically decreased tumor volume and suppressed local metastasis while bearing minimal effect on surrounding tissue and other vital organs like liver and kidney.

“It can suppress the movement of cancer cells and suppress their growth and it is found to be even more effective than conventional drugs (eg. cisplatin),” said Anthony Yuen, a professor at the University of Hong Kong’s surgery department.
“It’s even more effective if we combine it with chemotherapy drugs, and has very little side effects,” he said.

Interestingly, lupeol was found to be more effective and more potent than conventionally used chemotherapeutic drug, cisplatin, by approximately three-fold in terms of tumor volume and degree of metastasis suppression.

Besides, when lupeol was used in combination with cisplatin, the anti-tumor activity of the chemotherapeutic drug could be enhanced by 40-fold.

The above research result was published in the international scientific journal Cancer Research in September, 2007.

Head and neck cancer includes cancers of the nose, oral cavity, salivary gland, etc. In the year 2004, 2,087 new cases were diagnosed in Hong Kong, with the number of new cases increasing steadily every year.

Human papilloma virus infection, alcohol and tobacco consumption and low fruits and vegetables intake all contribute to the increased risk of head and neck cancer development.

The university was in the hope that the findings will also show people that only a slight change in their everyday meal or a small change in their choice of food intake may have an astounding impact on cancer prevention and therapy.

“Conventional drugs made the mice a lot thinner, but lupeol mice retained their bulk.” Emaciation is usually viewed as a bad sign in the fight against cancer.

Yuen hopes lupeol can be applied to other cancers that are similarly dependent on the NFkB protein to grow and spread.

“It may be possible to use (lupeol) in other cancers because it is able to suppress the NFkB protien, which is activated in many cancers like prostate cancer, breast cancer, liver cancer,” Yuen said.

This approach may be able to cure the patient, however recurrences do occur. Researchers want to find out which patients may be more susceptible to a recurrence so that they can either monitor them more closely or treat them more aggressively to reduce the risk of recurrence.

An article was published in Lancet Oncology saying that markers may help predict the risk of cancer recurrences in patients who are treated with a radical cystectomy. Researchers from Texas and Canada conducted a clinical study to evaluate markers found in the the tissue samples taken after surgery. The markers tested included the expression of Bcl-2, caspase-3, P53, and survivin.

The study found that those patients that had an altered expression of Bcl-2, caspase-3, P533 and survivin were associated with over four times the risk of cancer recurrence. Also, the altered expression of all of these bio-markers was associated with nearly seven times the risk of death from cancer.

The researchers conclude that these findings support other studies that show these bio-markers can help predict who will remain cancer free. They look at this as moving forward towards more individualized treatments for the patients.

It did not say in the article whether using this test after the surgery would help them to determine if chemotherapy or radiation would be something that could reduce the risk of recurrence if the markers would show a high risk category of recurrence. I think this these studies are great but we need to be moving forward to get the patients to benefit from this vital information.

Researchers conducted a small clinical trial that included 38 patients with metastatic breast cancer. Complete disappearance of cancer was achieved in nearly 9 percent of patients. Partial responses were achieved in about 44 percent of patients. Disease stabilization was seen in almost 33 percent of study participants.

Even though the study was a small one, researchers conclude that it appears that treatment with Abraxane and Xeloda may be effective for patients with metastatic breast cancer.

The researchers reported in the current issue of Clinical Cancer Research that the vaccine helped stimulate immune cell production in up to seventy percent of the patients studied.

Two new studies at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center have demonstrated that, combined with specially-packaged anti-cancer drugs, the bacterial therapy’s prospects for cancer eradication has dramatically improved.

Boffins conducting the studies, which were carried out on mouse models, found that genetically-modified bacteria called Clostridium novyi-NT (C.novy-NT) have a special taste for oxygen-starved environments much like those found in the core of cancer cell clusters.

“It is not difficult to kill cancer cells. The challenge is killing them while sparing normal cells,” said Bert Vogelstein, M.D., professor and co-director of the Ludwig Center and Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center.

The Hopkins team had discovered in 2001 that though the bacteria was able to grow and spread in the oxygen-poor core of mouse tumors and the blackened scars signaling that most of the cancer cells had been destroyed, it could not destroy cancer cells at the still oxygen-rich edge of the tumors.

When the Hopkins team added specially-packaged chemotherapy to the bacterial attack, the combination temporarily wiped out both large and small tumors in almost 100 mice and permanently cured more than two-thirds of them.

The likely explanation is that combination treatment works because the bacteria expose the tumors to six times the amount of chemotherapy than is usually the case by improving the breakdown and dispersal of the chemotherapy’s fatty package at the tumor site.

The investigators repeated experiments using two packaged chemotherapy drugs — doxorubicin and irinotecan — and observed similar tumor-killing effects of both when used in combination with the bacteria.

“Drugs contained in these ‘Trojan horse’ compartments are specifically released at the tumor site by the C-novyi-NT bacteria which may improve the effectiveness and safety of the therapy,” said Ian Cheong, Ph.D., the lead author of the study.

The study is published in the November 24 issue of Science.

In a companion study published in the November 19 online issue of Nature Biotechnology, the Hopkins team decoded the entire C.novyi-NT genome which Shibin Zhou, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of oncology at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, says “was instrumental in identifying liposomase and will help improve our bacterial-based therapies.”

Called an “optical biopsy,” the technique can detect so-called pre-cancers – collections of a few hundred malignant cells lurking among millions of healthy cells – that usually fly under the radar of standard cancer screenings.  

By using near-infrared fluorescence imaging, doctors may spot cancer risk before any physical signs appear.

“Since we use the near-infrared red light, there’s much better penetration into the tissue. Near-infrared red is a biologically transparent light so it is quite safe for human cells and tissues,” A researcher at National University Hospital said. “However, near-infrared rays also produce a weak signal and it may take hours to get a reading – something which the NUS team had overcome with a hardware they had designed and are fine tuning,” the researcher added.

The hospital is conducting a trial involving 58 patients, 12 of whom are receiving treatment after the “optical biopsy” diagnosed them with early-stage cervical cancer.

The technique detects pre-cancers or collections of a few hundred malignant cells among millions of healthy cells.

The new technique can be applied to almost any cancer, but not without more clinical trials and further improvements to the hardware used, like better probes.

The results of their findings were published in the scientific publication, Journal Of Analytical Chemistry.

However, Prof Soo Khee Chee, director of the National Cancer Centre, cautions against simply relying on optical biopsies for diagnosis

Researchers at the University of Nottingham cloned an antibody called 105AD7 from a patient with colorectal cancer who survived seven years with liver metastases.

“This is the first vaccine shown to stimulate TNF-alpha — an immune system protein that is very effective at killing cancer cells,” says senior author Professor Lindy Durrant, from the University of Nottingham in England.

The study involved 67 patients, average age 66, with colorectal cancer of varying severity. They were randomized to receive 100 mcg of 105AD7, 105AD7 with BCG (a bacteria used to stimulate the immune system in cancer patients) during the first immunization followed by 105AD7 alone, or no treatment.

Around 70 percent of patients responded to the vaccine, which increased the production of an immune system protein called TNF-alpha. TNF-alpha stimulated the production of killer T cells, which produced cancer-destroying immune proteins called cytokines. Survival rates were not studied.

“This is very unusual, as most patients die within one year of getting liver metastases,” reported Durrant. “I thought if this antibody had helped this patient if we could clone it — it might help others.”

Patients were immunized before surgery on the day they started the study and again two weeks later if they had not had the surgery yet. The vaccines were also given at three, six, and 12 weeks after surgery, then at three monthly intervals for up to two years. Lab tests show most of the patients had a T-cell response against the vaccine.

The study appears in the November 15 issue of Clinical Cancer Research.

Chemotherapy is given after surgery to patients suffering from breast cancer to destroy any molecules of cancer that might have spread to other parts of the body. The standard chemotherapy treatment involves a combination of three drugs and is known as CMF (a cocktail of clophosphamide, methotrexate and fluorouracil). In the study, doctors have announced that a chemotherapy “super-cocktail” given to women with breast cancer reduced deaths by more than 30 per cent, compared with standard treatment. This news comes from two British studies that together looked at 2,400 patients with early breast cancer. Both studies show better survival rates with epirubicin in addition to standard chemotherapy.

In the study, half of the patients were treated with the standard chemotherapy while the other half were given the drug epirubicin along with the standard chemotherapy.

The researchers found that in group of patients treated with epirubicin plus chemotherapy, 82 percent lived for at least 5 years and 76 percent did not have relapses. Whereas in the patients treated only with the standard chemotherapy, only 75 percent lived for at least five years and only 69 percent did not have relapses.

Chris Poole, the consultant medical oncologist at the University of Birmingham, said: “The results show conclusively that the addition of epirubicin to chemotherapy has a significant impact on survival in early stage breast cancer.”

Dr Poole said that most women with breast cancer in the UK would be treated with epirubicin. “But whether they are getting it in the right dose and on the right schedule is another matter,” he said.

High doses of epirubicin were administered for the first four cycles of treatment but it was then replaced with standard chemotherapy, maximizing the impact of the drug but minimizing the long-term risks, such as leukemia.

The women were recruited to the study between 1996 and 2001 to look at the recurrence of tumors and survival rates. Unlike the hormonal treatment Herceptin, which is effective in only 20 per cent of patients with oestrogen-positive breast cancer, chemotherapy works for all women?

“It is an old-fashioned, blunderbuss treatment. It does seem to be uniformly effective,” Dr Poole said.

The evidence showed that the effects of hormonal drugs such as Herceptin given after chemotherapy had a cumulative effect, on top of any survival gain achieved by the chemotherapy, Dr Poole said.

The researchers maintain that further studies need to be conducted before the doctors are able to determine the best chemotherapy regimen for an individual patients caner treatment.

The results of the studies, funded by Cancer Research UK and others are published today in the New England Journal of Medicine.

After eight weeks of Zometa, 13 of the 31 patients, 42 percent reported a reduction in pain. Researchers concluded that for breast cancer patients with worsening bone metastasis switching to Zometa can improve pain. Results of this trial need to be confirmed by a Phase III clinical trial.

Dr. Michael J. Zelefsky, Chief of the Brachytherapy Service at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, said “This study confirms that we can improve patients’ quality of life by reducing the side effects of radiotherapy while maintaining disease-free survival.”